npm - how to show the latest version of a package

Question

How do I use npm to show the latest version of a module? I am expecting something like npm --latest express to print out v3.0.0.

Answer 1

The npm view version prints the last version by release date. That might very well be an hotfix release for a older stable branch at times.

The solution is to list all versions and fetch the last one by version number

$ npm view  versions --json | jq -r '.[-1]'

Or with awk instead of jq:

$ npm view  --json  | awk '/"$/{print gensub("[ \"]", "", "G")}'